882: Mailbag 5/17/24

JJ Zachariason (0:02)

This is the Late Round Podcast with your host, JJ Zacharissa.

What's up, everyone? It's JJ Zachariason. In this episode, 882 of The Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast, sponsored by Underdog Fantasy, thank you for tuning in.

I'm literally giving you a free Late-Round Draft Guide to try out Underdog Fantasy. Right now, the guide is available for pre-order over on lateround.com. But if you've never signed up on Underdog, you can head to underdogfantasy.com or download the app, sign up using promo code LATEROUND, make a deposit, and you'll get the guide. That guide will be emailed to you on July 1st when it launches. And you should be checking out Underdog regardless. There are tons of best ball contests happening right now at different entries, and there are other game types too. You don't need to have a huge bankroll to play, and you don't need to max-enter every contest to win. There are literally contests for everyone. Check it all out at underdogfantasy.com or download the Underdog app. And like I said, when you use promo code LATEROUND to sign up, and when you make a deposit, you'll get a free Late-Round Draft Guide along with a deposit offer. That draft guide is currently for sale for $19.99. It's going to be $24.99 when it does launch on July 1st. So you're getting it for absolutely free to help out your season-long drafts. And it can help out with your best ball drafts too. So one more time, underdogfantasy.com or download the Underdog app and use promo code LATEROUND. Now let's get to these mailbag questions.

The first question this week is from Patreon. It's from Jack. It says, Hey JJ, love the work last year about first reads and RPO offenses. Based on that, is Terry McLaurin being slept on? This obviously is assuming Cliff Kingsbury calls a heavy RPO system, but scary Terry strikes me as this year's Michael Pittman. Thanks. So last summer, I did a little work on the RPO, the run pass option, and it was sort of a piggyback off of some of Ben Gretzch's work. And the TLDR was that there seemed to be some signal around heavy RPO teams and those teams having one or two pass catchers with really high target shares. And intuitively, it kind of makes sense. When running an RPO, you're either running or you're getting a pass off fairly quickly. You're not dropping back and typically going through progressions as a quarterback. That means the designed throw is going to a specific player, and it would make sense for that player to be the same guy over and over again, the best weapon on your team. Just last year, we saw this come to fruition once again. According to Pro Football Reference, the top five teams in RPO pass rate, which is the percentage of passes that came from RPO plays, the top five teams were the Dolphins, Ravens, Colts, Eagles, and Falcons. Three of those teams had a wide receiver with a 25% target share per game rate. Three of those offense also had multiple 20% target share players, which plays into the idea that an RPO heavy team is just heavily targeting a couple of guys in an offense. For context, 11 of the remaining 27 teams in the NFL, they were able to have two 20% target share pass catchers. So the difference between the top five group and the rest of the league is 60% versus 41%.

But yeah, that's a pretty small sample size. It might be meaningless. Honestly, this RPO stuff, it's all still pretty new. There's not a ton of data on it in general. With that being said, the data does date back to 2019 And since 2019, we've had 18 teams at an RPO pass rate of 15% or more. Again, that means that at least 15% of their pass attempts came from RPO plays. Of those 18 teams, 56% of them had more than one player with a 20% target share. That was about 30% for the other NFL teams. And if you look at the teams who had a player with a 25% target share, the high RPO teams see an increase of more than 20 percentage points compared to teams with RPO rates below 15%. To put that all another way, yes, personnel is definitely dictating some of this. But there's a little bit of signal here showing us that RPO heavy offenses seem to come with players with high target shares.

That leads me to Washington. I think people assume teams with mobile quarterbacks run more RPOs. And while you'll see a trend in that direction, it's not a necessity. Look at Miami last year, or even Atlanta, or Indianapolis, who didn't have Anthony Richardson for most of the year. It's not like those teams were using ultra-mobile quarterbacks, but they finished in the top five in RPO rate last year. I think if anything, that may show us that individual coordinator and coaches either like RPOs or they don't. Miami has had Mike McDaniel for two seasons now. They've been fifth and first in RPO rate. Shane Steichen was in Philly as their offensive coordinator in 2021 and 2022 Those two seasons, the Eagles were first and second in RPO rate. This past year in Indianapolis, despite losing Anthony Richardson, Indianapolis was third.